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The Times, February 19 2018 |
Anna Picard |
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Wolf: Italienisches Liederbuch, London, 16. Februar 2018 |
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Concert review: Diana Damrau/ Jonas Kaufmann/ Helmut Deutsch at the Barbican
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How silly lovers are. How selfish in their delight and despair. How puffed
up with pride and longing and jealousy. Drawn from anonymous texts from
Tuscany and Venice, the 46 songs in Hugo Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch
ricochet between bliss and agony. Scored for male and female voice and
piano, they are not a song cycle per se but a sequence of love-drunk
miniatures, tinted after the styles of Schubert, Schumann and Wagner, and
crimped with harmonic ambiguities.
Reordered and grouped into four
sections by the pianist Helmut Deutsch, the tenor Jonas Kaufmann and the
soprano Diana Damrau, Wolf’s songs were presented as a fragmentary history
of a volatile romance. This was not an event for Valentines. Flirting,
bickering, yielding and parting, Kaufmann’s he and Damrau’s she revelled in
the repetitions and contradictions of neurotic obsessive love. Only the
first (Auch kleine Dinge) and final (Ich hab in Penna einen Liebsten wohnen)
songs remained in their usual place, making this a story of disenchantment
in which Damrau’s character, sparkling and supple of tone, and fully engaged
with each syllable of the text, emerged as a terrible flirt.
Lieder
recitals are fascinating tests of acting ability. There was too much
mugging, especially from Kaufmann, whose fan base obliged by laughing over
the final cadences. This was frustrating, for the cadences are where the
mania and genius of Wolf’s writing are most clearly felt. Deutsch’s delicacy
and precision, the opulent folding of colour in Ihr seid die Allerschönste
and the Mahlerian shimmer of O wüsstest du, wie viel ich deinetwegen
deserved more space to land and register. Not until the opiate barcarolle of
Sterb’ ich, so hüllt in Blumen meine Glieder, sung ravishingly and
Wagnerianly by Kaufmann, did things settle. There were flowers for the
singers from the audience and from the Barbican, but none for Deutsch. The
campaign for a pianist’s bouquet begins here.
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